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Conger eel

Conger conger

Conger conger (Linnaeus, 1758) · Congridae WoRMS 126285

Reference photos

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A long, powerful grey-brown eel with scaleless skin and the dorsal, tail and anal fins fused into one continuous fringe. It spends the day in a hole or crevice in rock or a wreck and becomes active at night to hunt.

Depth

0-500 m over most of the range, with records to 1171 m; descends to thousands of metres to spawn

Size

Up to 275-300 cm total length and 110 kg, commonly 100-200 cm

Habitat

Holes and crevices on rocky or sandy bottoms, in wrecks and other artificial structures; young stay inshore, adults move deeper

Behaviour

Rests in its hole by day and hunts at night; breeds once, migrating to deep mid-Atlantic water to spawn, then dies

Diet

I eat

  • Bony fish taken at night, from whiting, poor cod and dragonet to flatfish such as plaice and dab
  • Bottom-living crustaceans: crabs including edible and shore crab, squat and Norway lobsters, shrimps and prawns
  • Cephalopods: curled octopus, squid, and young cuttlefish

Where you'd find it

Found around most of Britain and Ireland, though less often in the North Sea and the Irish Sea.

ChannelCeltic SeaNorth SeaIrish SeaW of IrelandW of Scotland
Often seenNow and thenWhere PEBL filmsBased on marine survey records (OBIS). Blank seas can mean nobody has looked there, not that the animal is absent.

Sources

Open-access references behind this page. Every statement on this page was read out of one of them; anything that could not be traced to a source was taken off the page rather than left standing. Each link was checked on the date shown, and confirmed then to be about this species.

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